If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Proper budgeting has always kept households solvent. Whatever money or income you have to live on, you must be realistic about how much you need and budget accordingly. We all know when we don't have enough money; it becomes more and more important.
The government have done something right. Hoorah. On the Andrew Marr show, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said that any individual that has abused human rights would not be able to enter the country.
I'm a big believer of it's not where you're from, it's what you do that matters. Richard Benyon is one of the richest landowners in Berkshire, the great, great, great grandson of a former Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and lives in a Tudor Mansion. He is firmly in the 1% and it doesn't bother me at all.
The man in charge of the land of the free (not Donald Trump) rocked up to ABC News earlier this month and told America gay marriage should be legal. Earlier this week the leader of this great country had a spokesperson issue a statement declaring gay marriage was a government commitment. This week, Number 10 announced that MPs will be allowed a free vote on gay marriage because like abortion, equal marriage was "an issue of conscience". Why does our government seem to act on sexuality as if it's a lifestyle choice? Nothing says choose me more than social exclusion, risk of losing family, friends, abuse and attacks that even in the UK in 2011 lead to death.
To borrow some lyrics from the song 'E's are good' by the 90s dance band, The Shaman, David Willetts has been 'very much maligned and misunderstood'. Or so he would like us to think. The problem is that so long as he continues to pay no attention to who he is speaking to he is likely to remain maligned and misunderstood.
This is a big deal - we are not only putting a truly vast sum of money at stake - the defence contractors estimate £25 billion, so we can assume at least three times that, 10 years late - we are also binding ourselves into a strategic commitment to maintaining not just a nuclear arsenal, but to a uniquely cold-war era one, based around submarine launched ballistic missiles.
Alan Johnson MP has revealed that he is considering a bid for London Mayor in 2016. Here are four reasons why he is Labour's best choice.
Ultimately, we must invest in our infrastructure and make the UK the most attractive place in the world to do business. It's time to stop the talk and get spending. If this is the course of action the Government has decided to take - rightly, in my view - let's get on with it.
Back into recession, austerity yet to fully bite, pressure from backbenchers, the Opposition and world leaders - the Government needs to take bold action to show that austerity and growth can go together.
The endless eurozone crisis provokes a despairing weariness. The G8 has come and gone in Camp David, bringing, so it seems, a solution no nearer. Yet another EU summit will gather later this week. No-one is holding their breath that something fresh and decisive will emerge to halt the ever-mestasising threat of sovereign default. Yet, something has recently changed. To weariness, now add raw alarm. Over the years, European politicians have repeatedly cried wolf, invoking deadlines for a final solution to the euro-crisis that they have then declined to honour. Now, the new deadline is the Greek general election on 17 June. David Cameron has even labelled it a referendum on membership of the eurozone.
According to the Observer, senior members of Labour's shadow cabinet want Ed Miliband to commit Labour at the next election to an in-out referendum on the European Union. Is that wise?
I give you, courtesy of Conservative Home, a website offering therapy for frustrated Tories, this unattractive vignette: "Mr Hilton was also accused of being unprofessional: turning up at the meeting in shorts and a T-shirt, clutching a plastic bag full of oranges. As the meeting went on, Mr Hilton is said to have started 'inexpertly' peeling an orange, getting juice all over the crotch of his brushed cotton shorts.
Something really extraordinary has happened this week. In his speech to the IOD in Manchester, the prime minister has fashioned a new narrative for his government's economic agenda. Before jetting off to the G8 in the US, he has talked of austerity WITH stimulus for the first time - and seems to have consigned to the political dustbin that 'binary choice' rhetoric of his first two years in government. With low to no growth in the UK, Camp David may prove to be an appropriately named location for one D Cameron. Is he now pitching his tent on new political ground? I'm fascinated.
Two years into government, after 13 years in opposition (or in the case of the Liberal Democrats almost a century) you would have expected a Queen's Speech packed with ideas. Ministers would have spent months battling it out to have their legislation included in the government's packed programme.
Predictably, the prime minster is taking flak over his decision to run parenting classes for people. As expected, some are calling the initiative an example of the Nanny State. In due course, editors will pull out examples of poor parenting by members of his government or those who advise him. We all know what's coming, don't we?
Boris Johnson provoked both glee and outrage when he wrote, in his regular Telegraph column, that the next Director General of the BBC should be a Tory. "Imagine", opined Alastair Campbell "if we had said what Boris said". The difference, of course, is that a Labour politician would never say it. They just did it.
